“I feel different.”
“Already?”
“Mad, huh?” Jamie disentangled himself from Marc and gathered up the bed sheets to stuff in the laundry bag. “It’s not the pills; I think it’s just the perspective I’ve been missing all this time. The therapists I saw in Cali were toopositive, you know? Too optimistic. They told me that I could get better, but I didn’t believe them. It wasn’t like that yesterday. The bloke said I could manage the OCD, but it would never go away entirely, and I found that weirdly reassuring.”
“Makes sense,” Marc said. “Living with it doesn’t mean that you can’t be happy. I suppose it’s about acceptance, and being kind to yourself?”
“I think so. It’s going to be really hard, but I feel ready for it now in a way that I haven’t before. I’ve got a new job; I’ve, um, got you; and I can see a future. I didn’t have that in California. It was all too—I don’t know—temporary?”
That Jamie saw them as permanent made Marc weak at the knees. He sat on the edge of the bed and tugged Jamie to him. Jamie, attuned to him as ever, knelt down and rolled Marc’s sweatpants up, working quickly to free him of the prosthesis.
The relief was instant. Marc cupped Jamie’s face, tracing his thumb along the fading smudges beneath Jamie’s eyes. “You know there’s nothing I won’t do to help you, don’t you?”
Jamie nodded. “Always have, but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t let me help you too.”
“I’ll let you.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Epilogue
“You’re different.”
Jamie dished out a bowl of chicken noodles and set it in front of Zac, nudging the plate of thickly buttered bread along the breakfast bar. “Why? Because I’m clean?”
“You’ve been clean for two years.”
“You haven’t seen me in two years.”
Zac snorted. “Whose fault is that?”
There was a bite in Zac’s tone that Jamie wasn’t used to from Marc. In years gone by, he’d have reacted in kind, or rolled over and fixed another hit, but life had moved on, and so had they.
Jamie claimed his plate and sat opposite Zac. “Sorry, mate. We did Skype, though.”
“Eighteen months ago. I was starting to think you hated me.” Zac poked his noodles with a fork. “What is this? Posh Super Noodles?”
“Pretty much. I make them at Sheila’s kitchen, and they were the closest thing I could find to the dinners you used to make me.”
“It looks a million times better than the crap I used to cook. Liam does all the cooking at home. I feed the dogs and order the pizza.”
“Marc would eat toast every day if I let him.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jamie eyed his supper. He’d been starving when he’d started cooking, but being around Zac had put him on edge. Two hours in, and he still wasn’t sure if Zac wanted to hug him or stab him. “So... uh, how’s Marvin? I haven’t heard from him since I came here.”
“He’s fine,” Zac said in a neutral tone that scraped Jamie’s teeth. “Missing you, I reckon, but you knew that, didn’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means. That bloke was in love with you.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Yeah? And how’d you know that?”